Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, an international financing and partnership organization, told Reuters in an interview on June 7 that growing food shortages sparked by the Russia-Ukraine conflict may represent the same health threat to the world as the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
"Food shortages work in two ways. One is you have the tragedy of people actually starving to death. But second is you have the fact that often much larger numbers of people are poorly nourished, and that makes them more vulnerable to existing diseases," Sands said.
Furthermore, Sands said investment was needed to strengthen health systems to prepare for the consequences of the food crisis, which is part of the Global Fund's remit.
The Geneva-based organization is aiming to raise $18 billion to boost health systems, fight the three core diseases in its title, and reverse setbacks caused by the pandemic. They have raised one-third of their target for year 2024 to 2026.
Sands said the efforts the "global experts" are doing to improve pandemic preparedness should not include the "classic" mistake of concerning themselves only with crises that resemble the latest global catastrophe.
"It is not as well-defined as some brand new pathogen appearing with distinctive new symptoms. But it could well be just as deadly," Sands stated.
The World Health Organization reckons that about 15 million people may have died of coronavirus or its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the past two years. Most of the fatalities were in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas.
UN: We will take food from the hungry to feed the starving
The United Nations (UN) World Food Program (WFP) has come up with a solution to address the looming world famine.
David Beasley, the executive director of the WFP, said: "Just when you think the world food crisis couldn’t get any worse well over a year ago, you had Ethiopia and Afghanistan, and then the breadbasket of the world [Ukraine] – just got the longest breadlines of the world – and so now because of this crisis, we're taking food from the hungry to give to the starving," Beasley told the audience.
Aid agencies that are working in countries with the most urgent needs, including Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia, are having difficulties with how to make the funding work.
As of March, WFP has already reduced rations for eight million people in Yemen but the number of those most desperately in need is still growing. Moreover, in Afghanistan, the hunger-relief organization is running $525 million short of the funding it urgently requires for the next six months. In Ethiopia, they are more than $300 million short of the $957 million target fund. South Sudan communities have resorted to looting aid supplies and attacking aid workers as they still need $529 million.
In Sri Lanka, protests have already erupted over food and fuel shortages and the county has already declared bankruptcy. Similar chaos that endangers social and economic order is also being seen in Indonesia, Peru and Pakistan.
Beasley warned that this is "only a sign of things to come." (Related: Global crop collapse now a certainty… widespread famine to plague planet Earth from 2022 – 2024… it is set in motion and cannot be stopped.)
He also said there are about 49 million people in 43 other countries that the world needs to be extremely concerned about due to emerging famine, destabilization and mass migration.
In April, the Rockefeller Foundation warned that a massive and immediate food crisis will emerge in poorer nations following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. should lead efforts to "fully fund" the WFP and pre-position emergency food supplies in countries expected to face food shortages in the next six months, the foundation's President Rajiv Shah, said in an interview on Bloomberg TV.
Watch the below video that talks about food shortages in six months.
This video is from the Wardo Rants channel on Brighteon.com.
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